Elizabeth City Girls Willing to Work for $7 a Week, Feb. 12, 1926

Girls Anxious for Jobs Here. . . McClellan Store Co. Swamped with Applications for Jobs at $7 a Week

Scores of Elizabeth City girls are eager for jobs that pay as little as $7 a week to start. That’s what the new McClellan 5 cent to $1 Store pays, and although the store opens only today, it already has 75 girls on its waiting list after employing all it needed to start.

One explanation of the large number of girls eager for employment at low wages is the fact that some Elizabeth City Hosiery Mills are passing thru something of a crisis at this time, and there are not so many jobs open in the mills. But that isn’t the big reason.

More and more girls are seeking employment all the time because it costs a lot of money to keep the modern girl going, and there are not many fathers who are able to buy all the silk hose and beauty aids that a girl thinks she needs, and there are still a lot of fathers who don’t think a girl needs such things anyway.

But in many, many cases the girls want employment to enable them to help to support their families. They want money of their own not only to buy pretty things for themselves, but to beautify the home and make it a more attractive place to live in and receive company in.

Then too it is pointed out, a working girl stands a much better chance of marriage than a stay-at-home girl because she has an opportunity to mix in the world and meet more fellows.

A girl standing behind a counter in a store has a lot of opportunities to display herself to good advantage and attract a likely man.

This newspaper is also informed by the Bank Clerk and Soda Jerker that working girls are much more desirable matched because many young fellows on low wages would wait a long time before getting married if they were not encouraged by girls who are willing to work. The old, old days when two could live as cheaply as one are no more, and today it often happens that both the young husband and the young wife have to work for wages to make a start.

Anyway, there are a lot of girls looking for jobs in Elizabeth City and any industry that can use this class of labor can locate here with assurance that it won’t have to brings its labor in from the outside.

From the front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., February 12, 1926

The Bank Clerk and the Soda Jerker is a column in The Independent. You can read it on the same page as the above article:

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83025812/1926-02-12/ed-1/seq-1/